Is benchmarking in the arts getting trendy? I’ve been asked to attend more events and read and write more about the benefits of benchmarking in the last couple of months than I have in the past five years. Why? My guess is the increased interest is largely driven by adversity: there is now more of a need than ever to work out how your business could be made more efficient. I also see lots of artistic leaders are increasingly looking to the use (and occasional misuse) of data as a tool for advocacy.
Of course there’s been benchmarking initiatives in the arts for years. The pioneers have largely been that least glamorous part of the sector: Local Government run venues. My experience after 21 years working in the arts is that usually when the words ‘local’ and ‘government’ are uttered in the same sentence, eyes glaze over and brains wander. But they shouldn’t. There is so much the ‘independent’ arts sector could learn what has and hasn’t worked over the past decades of evolving performance management regimes.
But there have also been other benchmarking ‘pilots’ in the arts sector, including several as part of the Audience Data UK (ADUK) initiative from a few years ago. Confusingly, these pilots had very little to do specifically with ‘audiences’ but looked holistically across the whole range of work delivered by cohorts of similar sized galleries, theatres, arts centres and arts organisations specialising in working with disabled people.
Audiences UK has been tasked with providing the ADUK programme with a legacy and ensuring the lessons learnt are not forgotten. I’ll focus on one aspect today: scale and scope.
Every arts organisation will tell you it is ‘unique’. Dig deeper and you’ll be told that it believes it has peers but they are not local and will probably be in other regions or possibly nations. One of the benefits of the pilots to the organisations was the UK-wide nature of the project. Data collected and analysed was like gold dust because similar sized apples were being compared leading to meaningful facilitated discussions on how the findings of the data could improve business practice.
If you want to join a national benchmarking programme, you need to know that you will be able to compare your data against not just any old arts organisation, but ones that you think look like you. That means that there needs to be a really big pool of data so you can be sure that you’ll find enough similar organisations to you to make it worthwhile. So, if we were to design a national benchmarking programme we’d do three things:
1. Make sure you are collecting the most important data for a wide range of arts organisations by working in partnership with professional bodies and consulting widely within the sector and across the UK.
2. Make it as easy as humanly possible to upload your data and run reports by using cutting-edge web technology.
3. Make it free to arts organisations to use.
And that’s exactly what we have done. Working with organisations including the TMA and VAGA, we’ve received a grant from Arts Council England to agree a basket of indicators and set up a free web tool to allow organisations to post their data and run reports against other similar organisations. We’ve been consulting with a panel of industry experts from around the UK on the draft indicators and they will be ready for wider consultation very soon. And you’ll be able to use it free of charge.
It’s not rocket science and it’s not that glamorous, but we’re really proud of our sector-led national benchmarking initiative as we think that if enough organisations make use it, it could lead to better run arts businesses with increased resources focused on ensuring more people enjoy better art.
David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK
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